The Eye of Mammut
by Christine Morgan
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Copyright 2012 by Christine Morgan. All Rights Reserved.
Smashwords Edition.
Cover art by Natalia Lukiyanova and Tim Morgan. Copyright 2012. Used with permission.
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The Eye of Mammut
A woman drew near. He knew it by her thoughts.
Aruk paused, hands greened with juice from the shredded leaves. Then he added the fragments to the leather pot's bubbling contents. A strong but pleasing tangy scent rose on tendrils of steam.
The woman's presence burned brighter, a flame in his mind. She was worried. Conflicted. Torn. She wanted his advice, but was afraid.
He shrugged. She would come, or she wouldn't. They usually did, once they'd gathered their courage.
He went to the back of the cave and rummaged through the many baskets of food that were stacked alongside cured furs, un-knapped flint, sections of bone and antler, spears and tools. The stores were far more than any lone man had use for. But they always brought him something in gift, and he would never insult them by refusing. If winter came on harshly, he could always offer back to the tribe.
When he had selected a few hunks of dried meat to add to the pot, he returned to the firepit. The woman yet lingered, gathering her courage. In her mind, the cave was an even stranger and scarier place than it actually was. The figures on the walls, traced in charcoal and ocher, loomed large and fearsome to her imaginings. As if they moved, as if they lived. The spirits of animals and warriors and mysterious forces.
Aruk hunkered upon a flattish stone between the fire and the entrance, knowing that when the woman appeared, she would see him lit from behind by the shifting flames. The bearskin he wore, its intact skull atop his head like a hood, would seem to be a part of him. The claws of the same bear, strapped to the backs of his fingers, would gleam. All most impressive, as it was meant to be.
She was approaching at last. Carefully, nervously. She was young, he sensed. Young and not yet mated, with siblings to tend but no children of her own.
He sighed, already knowing what it would likely be. This girl-woman would have her heart set on some hunter or another, but not the one to whom she'd been promised by the Old-Mothers.
He shook his shaggy head. They expected much of their Spirit-Man.
As he heard the first hesitant steps of the young woman, his hairy brows went up. This was a high-status visitor. Eldest daughter of First Woman, who was First Hunter's chosen mate.
The woman's shadow touched the cliff face. She appeared after it, arms were laden with a basket. Aruk's nostrils flared. Red-berries. His favorite. Sweet and perfectly ripe.
The lines of her body were, like the berries, sweet and perfectly ripe. Hips round, breasts full. Her dark hair was thick as moss, her eyes were wide-set and clear. No doubt, competition had been fierce for this one. No doubt, many a fine gift had been presented to the Old-Mothers in hopes of winning their judgment.
"Wise Aruk?" The woman took a tentative step into the cave.
He rose in a slow motion, raising his arms so the bearskin spread in a wide shadow against the firelight. She gasped and cringed, but held her ground. With shaking hands, she held out the basket.
"Enter," he said.
"Wise, Aruk, I am Chala, daughter of Inasa who is mate to Garu who is First Hunter of Those Who Are Protected By The Bright Eye Of Mammut -"
"Yes, yes. Sit." He took the proffered basket. His mouth watered, but he refrained. There would be time for enjoying the treat later.
Chala, in a fine wrap of reindeer skin belted at the waist with a cord adorned by many fox-tails, lowered herself to the spot he'd indicated. Around her neck, hanging from a braided thong, was a slice of smooth-polished mammoth tusk.
Aruk squatted opposite her. "You are past old enough to be mated, Chala."
She grimaced. A yellow bitterness flooded her mind, and in it was the image of a stern, muscular hunter with a bushy beard.
"You are promised to Noav," Aruk said, enjoying her startled twitch. "Second Hunter of Those Who Are Protected By The Bright Eye Of Mammut. A hunter of great status. He could provide well for a mate and her children."
Chala frowned. "He is old, and ugly, and unkind."
"I am old and ugly," Aruk said, doing his best to sound injured.
"You are the Spirit-Man," she said. "You can have no mate."
He almost rubbed at his chest, where no hunter's mark had ever been scored into his flesh, but stopped himself. "True."
"I do not want Noav," Chala said. "His last mate's children are older than me, with hearths of their own already. I said this to the Old-Mothers but they would not hear me." Her chin quivered. "Even my own mother, a woman of high status, favors Noav. She tells me I should be proud to have him."
Aruk said nothing. She squirmed under his steady scrutiny.
"I love Dyan," she said in a rush. "Dyan is good and kind and handsome. He cares for me."
"Dyan is a hunter of poor status," Aruk said.
She bristled. "The other hunters never give him a chance, and take claim for his kills. They mock him."
He nodded for her to go on.
"If he had a high-status mate, they would never dare treat him so. He needs me. Please, wise Aruk, I want Dyan for my mate. The Old-Mothers say that he would not be able to provide, that my children and I would be cold and hungry, but they are wrong. I know that they are. All Dyan needs is a chance to prove himself!"
"What would you have me do?"
"Speak to them, please," she said, raising imploring brown eyes to him. "They will listen to you."
"The Spirit-Man has no power over decisions of the Old-Mothers. They see to the needs of the tribe's life. I interpret the will of the spirits."
"It is not the will of the spirits that I mate with Noav!" she cried, making fists as if she yearned for weapons gripped in them.
"Do you speak for the spirits?" he asked.
She hung her head. "No, wise Aruk. But they must see how I love Dyan!"
"The spirits do not concern themselves with love. They gift us with good hunting, plentiful food, and new life when they are pleased. They curse us with misfortune, sickness, and storms when they are displeased."
"Am I to be cursed with misfortune, then?" Her chin had long since stopped quivering, and now thrust out stubbornly.
Aruk did not like the hue and flavor of the thoughts churning in Chala's mind. They were too smoky for him to seize, and troubling.
"Chala, do not be foolish. We cannot force the spirits to do our bidding. Would you unleash their anger on yourself? Or on the tribe?"
Her sudden wave of scorn as she arose scathed him. She had come expecting great otherworldly power. He was Aruk the mighty Spirit-Man, was he not? Instead, she only found a useless old husk. The mighty Spirit-Man was afraid of the Old-Mothers, just like all the other men of the tribe.
"It is not fair, it is wrong! You call yourself so wise. You will see. You will know better! I will have Dyan as my mate or I will have no one!"
"Chala -"
The young woman fled from Aruk's cave. Her mind was turbulence, all desperation and anger and miserable love. He heard stones click and rattle under her rapid descent. And then she was gone from the reach of all of his senses.
When next he saw her, he would remember how pretty she had been, how lively, and he would grieve.
**
Tral went from deep sleep to full wakefulness almost at once. A hunter's knack, he prided himself as he disentangled himself from his little brothers in their warmth of piled furs. Jeruf snorted, blew a spit bubble, and turned over. No one else stirred. Inasa, his mother, was curled alongside her mate, Garu's arm draped over her swollen belly.
The cave echoed with the sounds of snoring. The fires were down to fluffy ashes and embers, shedding a wan glow. Thin pre-dawn light trickled in through its high arch of a mouth. Tral could see a dusky purple sky in which stars still twinkled, and the horizon was a band of paler blue-gold.
He tied his wrap more securely around his middle, lashed hide coverings to his feet, and picked up his spear and sling. He would bring back a nice fat bird or rabbit for Inasa and see her break into a proud, delighted smile.
As he picked his way on tiptoe toward the entrance, stepping around the fur-covered lumps of the rest of the tribe, he realized that his sister Chala was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Dyan, Tral saw as he crept out.
He sneered. Chala and Dyan. Everyone knew. Just as everyone knew it would never be allowed. Dyan! Worst hunter in the tribe. Clumsy and lazy and a liar as well.
The meadow in front of the cave sloped away into misty green, toward the dark and somnolent forest. The stillness was broken by the twitter of early-rising birds and the rustle of animals pushing through the underbrush.
Tral patted the bag of sling-stones that hung from his wrap-tie as he started for the forest. Out of habit, he glanced over his shoulder for a glimpse of the Eye of Mammut watching over the tribe's home.
He couldn't see it. Frowning, he stopped and turned around and surveyed the top arch of the opening more closely.
It should have been there. A mellow glint, like a cooling fire, catching the first light of the sun.
The Eye of Mammut … he had barely been more than a baby when it was found, but he knew the story. How Garu had slain a mammoth single-handedly, and found the Eye embedded in the earth near the fallen beast's head. Smooth like a river-stone but clear as clouded ice, honey-golden, large as a man's fist. A shape in the center, a dark line or crack that looked like a tusk when turned one way, and a spear when turned the other.
A token of good fortune, a gift from the spirits. Luck for the tribe. Luck in the hunt. That mammoth would be the first of many, bringing much meat and many ivory tusks to the tribe. A sign of blessing.
But it was gone.
Tral felt a knot in his stomach and another in his throat. He walked a few paces to one side and then the other, but the Eye still did not appear.
He remembered when Garu and Noav had scaled the sheer rock to place the Eye of Mammut over the entrance. That climb was a feat only the best and strongest hunters could have accomplished, and the others - hunters, old men, women, and children - had watched in breathless dread. But they had done it, and descended unharmed. And from that day, the Eye had guarded them.
It couldn't be gone. It just couldn't.
Thinking that it might have come loose and fallen somehow, Tral explored the meadow directly in front of the cave. He found several stones, but no Eye.
And then, tracks! Not animal prints, but the marks of hide-covered human feet indenting the dewy grass. Already, the hardy green was springing back up, obscuring the marks. They'd soon be completely gone.
The Eye … had it been taken? Had someone climbed the rocks and taken it away? The very idea was enough to make his head hurt.
Gripping his spear tightly, he followed the trail across the meadow and into the cold beneath the trees. His breath plumed up. He had a prickle on the back of his neck, and a vile taste seeping into his mouth. His skin puckered into a rash of tiny bumps.
His progress flushed a ground-dwelling bird. It exploded out of the bushes with a harsh cry. Tral jabbed wildly at it with his spear, coming nowhere close to hitting it. The bird escaped and there he stood, panting, heart thundering, body clammy with sweat.
Air slipped rapidly in and out of his flared nostrils as he grappled with his shameful scare. A bird. Him, a hunter, frightened by one bird. He was glad no one else had been with him to -
Then he caught the scents. Wolf! And blood.
His lips soundlessly formed the word. Wolf. But there was no one to hear him. Even if he shouted, would his voice reach back to the cave? Would it wake anyone? Would they find him?
Would it be in time?
His bladder seized in a cramp. He'd been too excited by the prospect of a morning hunt to think of voiding. Now it was a throbbing urgency. But nothing would draw a wolf faster than the sharp stink of urine.
Yips and snarls came from a dense thicket. High-pitched, underlain with an amused-sounding rumble. And then the sound of effortful ripping, an awful, meaty, rending noise.
Most of him was clamoring for the safety of the cave, but for some reason Tral found himself moving closer to the thicket. Holding his breath, feeling the breeze on his face and knowing he was downwind, he summoned a grown man's bravery and parted the branches.
The wolf pups, gangly, awkward, with big feet, snapped and squabbled with each other. Their muzzles were stained dark. The mother wolf decisively picked one up by the scruff and deposited it on the other side of the body.
The body.
Sprawled. Motionless. Bloody.
Tral shrieked. The she-wolf's lambent yellow eyes found him. Her powerful haunches gathered and tensed.
She sprang.
**
The tribe was gathered by the time Aruk arrived. He passed through them, wincing at the battering sensation of their minds.
He saw faces blanched ashen with shock, eyes glazed and dull. The hunters held their spears and clubs as if they had no idea what such implements were for. The women huddled. The children clung to their mothers.
The boy, Tral, was quaking like a sapling in a high wind. Garu, First Hunter and leader of the tribe, had an arm around the youngster's shoulders.
Smears of blood, one on each cheekbone and one down the center of his forehead, marked Tral's new status as a man despite his beardless youth. Wolf's blood. It caked the boy's spear, was splashed liberally on his hands and arms.
The wolf, a large and healthy female, lay dead at the base of a tree. Her dead pups were piled nearby.
Aruk stared at the animals, not wanting to look at what he'd been summoned here to see. But Fanri, his sister and eldest of the Old-Mothers, came to his side.
Swallowing hard, bracing himself against the smell of death, Aruk turned his attention to the body.
The wolves had been at it.
But that was not all.
He looked around at the hunters. Hanar, Garu, Noav, young Tral, others. They knew. It beat in their thoughts like a drum. They knew, but they would not say. That was for Aruk to do. To say what the men already knew, and would not voice.
Aruk wanted to shout at them. They were hunters. They had no need of him to tell them. Or did they hope he would say something else? That there might be some answer, some explanation, beyond the one that was so obvious to any man?
The women suspected. He felt it from them, beneath the grief and terror and dismay. But they, too, would not say it.
Their eyes were fixed on the Spirit-Man. Beseeching.
"No wolf did this," he said.
A rippling sigh from the tribe, shoulders slumping, but no looks of surprise.
Death was no stranger to them. They had seen it in countless ways. Hunters trampled beneath hooves, gored by horns, ripped apart by flashing claws and fangs. Women dying in blood and agony trying to give birth. Falls, sickness, the slow death of poison from sting or bite. Those things were all familiar to the tribe.
This, though …
Chala lay with one arm folded awkwardly beneath her torso, the other outflung, fingers nibbled to the bone by the pups. The wolves had torn open her belly to get at the entrails, and chewed the ragged meat of her throat. Her head had been nearly severed.
The life must have spouted from her in a red torrent. Yet little blood soaked the earth. Too little. Not nearly enough.
"It was not done here," Aruk said, hardly aware that he spoke aloud. "She was brought here after her death."
He bent closer, lifting away strands of hair. The awful gash gaped wide and straight. No animal claw could have done such a thing.
Grimacing, he reached into the wound. The nearest of the tribe turned away. Aruk tried to close himself to the yammer and gabble of their thoughts. Bad enough that he should constantly have the murmuring of the spirit-voices, let alone all the tribe's.
His fingertips found something hard and sharp. He drew it out and wiped it clean on his wrap before examining it.
A shard of stone. He could have fit it on the nail of his forefinger.
"Flint," he said.
He sat back on his heels and looked at the hunters. When injured prey still struggled and fought, one of them would leap upon the beast and, seizing it by the head, yank a sturdy flint knife hard across the exposed throat.
"Chala was killed by no animal," Aruk said. "She was slain by one of her own kind, her throat cut, and then left here for the scavengers."
Inasa howled and collapsed to her knees, rocking, rending her hair, and shaking off the attempts of the other women to console her.
"You are saying this was done by a man?" Garu said.
"It may have been a woman," Aruk allowed. "But it was one of us."
"No!" Inasha cried. "I will not believe it! One of us? Of this tribe, my tribe? No!"
A fervor and panic of thoughts assaulted Aruk. He pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, eyes squeezed shut. Everyone was speaking at once, shouting at once. The women joined Inasa's loud lamentations, the children were crying, the men roaring to be heard.
It was more than he could bear. His head would split from the force of it, split like a brittle shell. They were in his mind like a storm. Whirling and crashing, a wind and thunder of emotion.
"Stop! No more!"
It was Fanri, her voice shrill and piercing, cutting through the commotion. Aruk felt her tender, gnarled hand on his pain-wracked head.
"No more," she repeated softly into the hush. "You hurt the Spirit-Man with such a noise."
"But to say that one of us did this!" Garu said. "That a hunter of my own tribe killed the daughter of my mate … it cannot be."
"You have seen the work of animals," Aruk said. He opened his eyes, though the patches of daylight through the dapple of leaves felt like many tiny spears jabbing into them. "No beast did this, unless it is a beast that walks on two legs like a man, uses a knife like a man."
"Could it … could it have been a spirit?" asked Hanar in a tentative whisper.
Aruk shook his head. He rose, gladly accepting the support of his frail sister.
"But the spirits let it happen," Noav said. He nearly growled it, staring down at the sprawled body. "They did not save her."
"Spirits!" It burst from Tral in a cracked squeak. His face, turning to the mate of his mother with large and fearful eyes. "The Eye of Mammut … it is gone!"
"What?" Aruk and Garu demanded as one.
"I saw that it was not there," Tral said. He looked like a child again, as though he would have given anything to be able to cling to his mother as his little siblings were doing. "When I left the cave this morning. Before I found her. It was gone."
"Gone?" Hanar was ashen. "We have lost the protection of the Eye? We are in the disfavor of the spirits! This is the beginning! Soon, we will all die!"
His fear inflamed the others. A splitting agony, as if his skull had been chopped in two by a hand-axe, drove Aruk to his knees again. A rolling cloud of blackness billowed up and swallowed him.
**
Garu and Fanri had finally quieted the tribe, except for the ceaseless sobs of Inasa and the weeping of her younger children. The way the Spirit-Man had plunged bonelessly to the unyielding ground had further frightened them. Not even Fanri's assurances could bring them much comfort.
"You are certain that the Eye is gone?" Garu asked the son of his mate.
Tral nodded. The leader's heart swelled with pride for the boy even as it twisted in grief for the boy's dead sister. No. Not a boy anymore. The young man. The hunter. Tral Wolf-Slayer.
"I do not doubt the word of a hunter," Garu said, "but I must see for myself."
"We cannot leave Chala here for the wolves," Fanri said. "Or my brother."
Garu blew out a breath that steamed in the cool of the morning. "Bring them. Prepare Chala. She will be buried."
"And what of the one who killed her?" Inasa, eyes puffed and red, raised her hands plaintively to him. "Who did this? Who?"
The leader looked from one hunter's face to the next. Rugged, bearded, scarred, familiar. Dark eyes beneath heavy brows. Skin browned and weathered by the sun. He could not believe it of any of them. They were closer than brothers, the hunters were. They had to be. Their lives depended on trust, and acting as one. It was the only way that they, smaller and lacking claws, could bring down the big game.
The idea that one of his own had done this was almost beyond his comprehension. Hunters killed for food. They did not eat of their own kind. Only when a man was slain in the hunt did his fellows gather around, cut open his chest, and share his heart among them so that his strength and courage would not be lost from the tribe. No hunter …
It came to him slowly, and he turned around to search the faces again.
"Where is Dyan?" Garu asked.
Everyone glanced around. Tral spoke up first.
"He was not in his sleeping-place when I left the cave. He and Chala both were gone."
"Dyan!" Noav spat the name like a bite of rotten food. "He has done this?"
"Why would he harm Chala?" Gyri, the daughter of Noav's mate, asked. "They were …"
She lapsed into silence as Noav scowled.
Garu held his hands around his mouth to call as loud as he could. "Dyan!"
A bird chattered crossly, but there was no other reply.
"He has fled, the coward," said Noav. "He cannot kill a bison, no, but he can kill a helpless woman. And he has taken the Eye of Mammut! He has taken the favor of the spirits from us!"
"If Dyan was skilled at anything," Hanar said, "it was climbing. I have seen him scale rocks that would make a goat afraid, or climb trees fast as a squirrel. He could have reached the Eye."
"He has not gone far," Noav said. "Her blood is not yet dry. First Hunter, I ask permission to track this killer."
"You have it," Garu said. "Bring back the Eye, and Dyan as well. I want to speak with him."
"Mate of my mother, I, too, want to go," Tral said. He looked surprised at himself. "Chala was my sister. I am next eldest."
"I do not need the help of a boy," Noav grumbled.
"Boy he may be, but he slew the wolf and he is a hunter now." Garu clapped Tral on the back, making him stagger. "He has earned the privilege."
Tral drew himself tall at this honor. Noav glowered as though he might challenge the decision, then jerked his head in a brusque nod. Beckoning to the younger hunter, he set off into the woods.
Garu watched them go. His massive chest heaved up and down. His fists clenched.
The she-wolf and her pups were swiftly skinned. Their carcasses were left to rot, though Hanar pried out teeth to be threaded on cords as a trophy necklace for Tral.
"How is Aruk?" Garu asked the old woman.
"He visits with the spirits yet," Fanri said, smoothing the Spirit-Man's graying mane back from his brow. "He will wake, in time."
Garu ordered two men to carry the unconscious Aruk between them. Their clumsy procession made its way back across the meadow to the mouth of the cave.
He could see for himself the absence where the Eye of Mammut should have been. A pang of dread stabbed his gut. Without that stone, that sacred spirit-stone, what would become of the tribe? They could no longer call themselves Those Who Are Protected By The Bright Eye Of Mammut. They would be at the mercy of hostile forces.
Chala was taken away to the place where the tribe buried their dead beneath cairns of river-rock. Aruk was taken into the cave to be tended. Everyone else searched all around, but the Eye was nowhere to be seen.
Handing his spear to his Third Hunter, Garu stripped off his outer wrap and made ready for the climb. It was hard going, his arms aching as he scrabbled for toe-holds on the rocky escarpment. The others stood in a loose ring beneath him, breathless with worry. Garu did not have to be a Spirit-Man to know what would be foremost in their minds - suppose that he fell? Suppose that Garu, First Hunter and leader of the tribe, broke his neck and died? What would happen to them then?
He shuddered, which nearly dislodged him and made that fate come true. Gritting his teeth, digging his fingers into the crevices of stone, he hauled himself up by brute strength and force of will.
The Eye was not there. But something else was, something that he caught up in his hand and looked at with disbelief.
It was a slice of mammoth tusk, polished smooth. A braided cord was threaded through the hole at its center. The ends of the cord were frayed, snapped.
The tusks of that mammoth had been his prize, and he had given pieces of them as gifts to his mother, his mate, his siblings, and his mate's children.
This was the one that Chala had worn.
**
The boy's words rang in Aruk's ears. The Eye of Mammut … gone … the Eye …
He remembered the day Garu had brought it back from the hunt. Leading the exhausted but triumphant men, all of them laden with meat and the rolled hide and the long ivory tusks. Aruk had watched them from his cave, far enough away to sense their excitement without being overrun.
An omen. A sign from the spirits. A token of good fortune. When the tribe needed it most, for it broke at long last the winter's brutal hold on the land.
From then on, the Eye of Mammut had held a guardian's place of honor, and the tribe had prospered. The women went out to gather food and came back with heaping baskets. Game all but leaped upon the hunter's spears. Many babies were born and thrived. The winters turned milder, the floods ran lower.
In all that time, there had been only four deaths. An old man to the infirmities of age, a young hunter to the tusks of a boar, Noav's mate in childbirth, and a girl-child swept away in the river.
Now …
Aruk revived with his head pounding but his mind no longer battered by the tumult of thoughts. He sensed them, yes, but fewer, calmer. The blackness that had engulfed him was fading.
Cool liquid bathed his face. Fanri was very close, giving instructions to the other women. He smelled medicinal herbs, and broth.
His eyes opened, their lids feeling held down by pebbles. Not his cave. The tribe's cave, soaring higher than three men standing on one another's shoulders.
He sat up. Fanri pressed a birchbark cup into his hands. The tea was strong, laced with medicinal herbs. As he drank, he realized that the chip of flint was still in his hand, stuck to his skin by a dried blotch of Chala's blood. Aruk plucked it up and held it thoughtfully before his eyes.
Women scurried about, busy with their tasks. The children, who would normally have been poking into everything, sat quiet and watched the proceedings with large, haunted eyes.
Garu came into the cave, a loop of cord dangled from his fist. He brought the item to Aruk. "I found it above, caught on the rocks. How did it come to be there, Spirit-Man?"
Inasa had wailed anew at the sight and tried to touch it, but Garu held it out of her reach, his gaze fixed on Aruk. As if, once again, waiting for him to speak that which the tribe's leader already knew.
"Chala took the Eye of Mammut," Aruk said, bracing his mind against the onslaught. It came as expected, nearly flattening him.
"She climbed that? A woman?" Gyri asked, mouth hanging open in amazement.
"Why would Chala take the Eye?" Inasa demanded. "She was my eldest daughter, a woman of high status!"
"To try and bend the spirits to her will," Aruk said, feeling suddenly very old and very weary. "To force them to give a sign that would stop her becoming the mate of Noav."
Gyri stiffened indignantly. "My dead mother's mate is Second Hunter! A good provider! She -"
"Hush," said Fanri. "We all know Chala wanted Dyan for her mate."
Inasa's head drooped in shame. Her daughter … not yet mated, and therefore still her responsibility. And to have done something like this, for love of an unworthy hunter!
"But she did not have the Eye," she said, her tone pleading. "If she took it, where is it?"
"Dyan must have taken it from her." Garu's upper lip curled away from his tough yellow teeth in a snarl. "When he killed her."
**
Noav went swiftly, bent so low that he appeared to be following the trail by scent alone. Tral had to trot to keep up. He was already regretting his rash request to accompany the older hunter. Had, perhaps, regretted it the moment the words left his lips.
A wolf was one thing. A human animal was another.
They had found the spot where the brutal act had been done. There, the reeds were bent and broken. Flies buzzed over the bloodstains. Strands of Chala's hair were caught on low boughs. One of the fox tails had been torn from her belt and Tral picked it up, thinking how she had adored the plush russet fur.
His neck prickled as he imagined deadly eyes watching from the concealment of the shadows. He strained his ears, but heard only the breath of wind in the trees, the cries of birds, and the chuckle of a creek flowing briskly over stones.
"I smell smoke," he hissed to Noav.
They crept in the direction of the elusive scent. Their leather-shod feet were silent except when they trod upon crackling dry leaves, or snapped twigs.
The creek had eaten away the earth from the roots of a massive tree. Its roots framed an undercut hollow. On the muddy bank was a small ring of stones, and the charred remains of wood from which tendrils of smoke still drifted.
Tral saw a bundle resting just within the overhanging shelf, and recognized it as a laced-together sack of hides that Chala had made.
Within, deeper in the shadows, he thought he saw something else. Another bundle? Dyan's? And a spear slanted against the earthen wall.
He turned to point these out to Noav, but the older hunter had already seen. He indicated with a gesture that Tral should stay put.
Objections rose up in Tral, but he bit them back. He hunkered obediently, eyes fixed on the undercut of the tree, squinting past the sun-dazzle on the rippling creek as Noav disappeared into the underbrush.
The wait went on and on. Tral's skin crept. He felt the prickle on the back of his neck again. As if someone was near, and moving stealthily nearer. His palms sweated on the haft of his spear. He pressed a fingertip to the crust of wolf's blood, wishing for the speed and bravery of the wolf to enter into him.
A sharp snap of wood brought Tral whirling around. The ground beneath him was loose and crumbling, eaten away by the creek. His heel punched through and he fell, landing flat on his back with a tremendous splash. Droplets caught the sun, twinkling. Knobby rocks pressed painfully into his spine. He sat up.
His attacker leaped down after him. swinging a heavy club at Tral's head.
**
Against Fanri's advice, Aruk paced and paced. The noise of many thoughts overwhelmed him.
He needed privacy to hear the voices of the spirits. But the tribe was all around him, waiting, expectant. He was the Spirit-Man, after all.
With an inarticulate cry, Aruk raced for the mouth of the cave, stumbling over and kicking over items in other hearths. A sharp point jabbed his foot. Wincing, Aruk instinctively looked down.
He saw a flint knife poking out from beneath a pile of sleeping-furs.
The thoughts of the tribe were blotted out by an avalanche, cold and tumbling and deadly-white, in his mind. It froze him.
"What is it, wise Aruk?" asked Garu.
Aruk picked up the knife. It had been wiped, but not entirely. Brownish streaks discolored the flint.
A flake had been chipped from its edge.
Looking up at Garu, unable to speak, Aruk took the shard he had removed from Chala's neck and touched it to the knife. It fit perfectly.
"It was Noav," he said. "Noav killed her."
**
Tral simultaneously ducked and jabbed with his spear as the club swung down. He turned Noav just enough so that the blow smashed down on Tral's left shoulder instead of shattering his skull. An immense pain, at once icy and searing, burst over him. He heard a loud crack, felt his bones pop out of place.
He kicked with both feet, acting purely on instinct. His heels hit Noav's shins, knocking the bigger man off balance. As Noav went down with a horrible growl of fury, Tral somehow scrambled out of the creek.
His left arm flopped limp, sending new stabs of agony with each movement. He wanted to hug it to him with his undamaged right, but needed his good hand to cling to the spear.
Unable to climb from the gully, knowing that to run over the wet and slippery stones was futile, Tral ducked into the dark undercut cave in the bank.
Dyan lay face-down on the ground. A pulpy, matted mess was all that remained of the back of his head.
Tral tripped on the corpse and went sprawling, bringing fresh pain crashing over his entire body. A shadow blotted out the light of the entrance.
Noav had to bend double to enter, giving Tral time to scramble to his feet. There was a niche at the rear of the little cave, some animal's burrow littered with old bones and droppings. Despite the pain of his useless arm, he wormed into it.
"You did it," he gasped.
"Come out of there, boy!" Noav reached in, his huge hand coming at Tral's face.
Tral bit deep, tasting dirt and blood. Noav bellowed and snatched his arm back out. Panting, each exhalation a whine that made him remember the wolf cubs, Tral groped for his knife.
Noav picked up an indifferently-made spear that must have been Dyan's. Tral struggled and twisted as he tried to retreat deeper into the burrow. Loose soil rained down on him. More fell as the spear jabbed into the earthen roof, but the angle was too awkward for it to find his flesh.
Noav glared in at him. "And they would call you a hunter, hiding in a hole like a rabbit. Pah!" He spat. "Come out and die like the man you think you are."
**
Aruk was only dimly aware of Garu holding him upright and helping him walk. He heard the First Hunter's urgent queries as a distant and unimportant murmur.
"Not far now," Aruk said. "I sense him, I feel him, so angry. Like a forest fire."
Noav. Angry, yes, waking in the night at their secretive whisperings. The ungrateful woman who should have been his mate … a proper prize for the Second Hunter … Chala, plump and enticing … fleeing the tribe with her worthless lover.
Bad enough that she should prefer Dyan, who could give her nothing! It was a slap to his face. But the offense was made worse when he heard them climbing the cliff, and understood that they meant to take the Eye of Mammut …
"Chala told Dyan that when the tribe learned the Eye was gone," Aruk whispered, hearing himself as if from very far away, "we would be in such terror of the spirits that we would agree to anything to have it back. Even the Old-Mothers would bend, and allow them to become mates."
He was lost in Noav's mind, reliving the Second Hunter's fury as he went in pursuit of Chala and Dyan.
Seeing it in the eyes of Noav's red-rage memory, Aruk recoiled from the image of Chala laughing as she carelessly tossed the Eye from hand to hand.
Dyan, for all his laziness, had fought to defend himself and the woman he loved. But he was no match for the maddened Noav. Aruk saw the back of Dyan's head crushing in. Saw his body falling, lying still.
Saw Chala, running, screaming. Saw a golden shimmer at Noav's feet. Saw him picking it up, thrusting it safely into the pouch where he kept his tools, before he gave chase.
Aruk pulled himself away from Garu, seizing a tree to support himself. His breath tore hotly in and out of his lungs.
"Chasing her," he groaned. "Catching her. Hair in his grasp. Her screams. Had to make her stop. Couldn't alert the tribe. Couldn't be found. The knife … pulling her head back by the hair … the edge, so sharp, ripping deep …"
And then the rest of it. Leaving her body near the wolves. Returning to the cave, meaning to replace the Eye in its spot of honor before anyone knew. But the boy awoke too soon, his shouts awakening the rest.
"He will kill Tral," Aruk said, bringing himself back to the here-and-now with a heroic effort. He stared into Garu's shocked brown eyes. "He will kill the boy, and say that Dyan did it."
"Not Tral!" Garu said, anguished. "My mate has lost one child already this day. Where?"
"There. The creek."
"Stay."
Aruk shook his head, which ached as though it might crack apart into fragments like an egg. He saw the darkness in Noav's thoughts, the burrow, the prey beyond reach. Hands digging furiously at the earth, trying to widen the hole, trying to get in. A yearning, strong, to strangle the life from Tral.
"I will go with you," Aruk said.
Garu set off at a run, and Aruk did his best to keep up. They came to the stream, saw Noav's club lying on the bank, heard his muffled voice cry out in sudden triumph. Heard Tral's squeal of fright turn into a choked gurgling.
"Tral!" Garu did not hesitate at plunging into the hollow beneath the tree. "Noav, no!"
Aruk stopped, feet in cool water that rushed and swirled around his leather foot-coverings. He saw it through three sets of eyes, a fractured and spinning scene as Garu drove the point of his spear between Noav's shoulderblades and Tral, wheezing for breath, dropped to the ground. Noav's pain was Aruk's, sending him to his knees.
The spear, pulling free with a gristly, sucking noise. Noav turning, a plea forming on his lips. Garu kicking him over, ramming the spear down into his belly. Punching through skin and muscle. Plunging into the guts.
Grunting, Aruk fell to his side, arms curled around his midsection. He saw Garu through Noav's mind, towering, lips skinned back in a fearsome grimace. Saw the boy, sitting, coughing and gagging, holding his bruised throat with one hand.
And then Noav's mind was dwindling, as a stone cast from a high clifftop might grow smaller and smaller before disappearing forever. His eyes saw no more, and neither did the eyes of Aruk. Only a darkness that was somehow not dark at all, but a howling white emptiness shot with a frigid blue. Ice. Walls of ice, relentless, unstoppable.
Aruk felt himself being dragged with Noav into that freezing nothingness. It loomed all around him, and in it he seemed to hear the whispers of other voices.
He knew them … his mother and her mate, dead long ago, calling him by name. The leader before Garu, mauled by a cave lion, warning him away. And here was Beyi, the girl he might have had for his mate if he had not been set apart from other men. Pretty Beyi as he remembered her, small and round, curly-haired.
Others. His tribe, his own.
Surrounding him. Calling to him. Welcoming him.
Among them, he was alone in his mind. For the first time since the gift of the spirits had come upon him in his boyhood, that gift sometimes as much a curse as a blessing, he was alone in his mind.
They wanted him to join them. Be one of them. Be with them forever. They loved him. They were his family, his friends.
Elsewhere, Noav was screaming.
Far and faint, his voice nearly lost to Aruk, but the terror in his cry was bone-piercing.
Death. This was death. Noav's, and Aruk's as well if he could not find his way back to himself. He knew with absolute surety that if he stayed, his spirit would be lost in this endless blizzard. And his body, left behind, would die.
They urged him to let it happen, be with them, stay with them. Beyi could be his now, as she had never been in life. He would not have to keep apart from the tribe, driven to madness by the constant hum and buzz of their thoughts. He …
He wished to live.
Old though he was, lonely though he was, he wished to live.
Somewhere far behind him was warmth, the warmth of yet-living flesh and blood. Aruk struggled toward it, fighting his way through the whirling white, pushing aside what felt like hands that clasped at him, tried to hold him back.
Aruk slipped away from them, and heard one final, awful cry from Noav.
His senses returned to him with a jarring jolt. Aruk realized he was falling but could not catch himself. He splashed into the creek, breathed water, and came up spitting and sputtering.
But alive. Alive, and himself.
Shuddering, the Spirit-Man crawled to the bank and sat with his knees drawn up, his forehead resting upon them. He sat in that pose for a long time, slowly recovering his wits.
A hand touched his shoulder.
Aruk opened his eyes, and looked up to see Garu before him. Beside the First Hunter, Tral's arm was bound to his side with strips of leather. Marks from Noav's fingers stood out livid on the flesh of his neck. But the young man was smiling through his pain.
Garu extended his hand, uncurled the fingers.
Aruk's breath slipped out in a sigh as he saw the Eye of Mammut cradled in the leader's palm. His own hand shook as he caressed its smooth surface.
"Let us put this back where it belongs," Garu said. "Let us go home."
###
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About the Author
Christine Morgan divides her writing time among many genres, from horror to historical, from superheroes to smut, anything in between and combinations thereof. She's a wife, a mom, a future crazy-cat-lady and a longtime gamer, who enjoys British television, cheesy action/disaster movies, cooking and crafts.
Her stories have appeared in several publications, including: The Book of All Flesh, The Book of Final Flesh, The Best of All Flesh, History is Dead, The World is Dead, Strange Stories of Sand and Sea, Fear of the Unknown, Hell Hath No Fury, Dreaded Pall, Path of the Bold, Cthulhu Sex Magazine and its best-of volume Horror Between the Sheets, Closet Desire IV, and Leather, Lace and Lust.
She's also a contributor to The Horror Fiction Review, a former member of the HWA, a regular at local conventions, and an ambitious self-publisher (six fantasy novels, four horror novels, six children's fantasy books, and two roleplaying supplements). Her work has appeared in Pyramid Magazine, GURPS Villains, been nominated for Origins Awards, and given Honorable Mention in two volumes of Year's Best Fantasy and Horror.
Her suspense thriller, The Widows Walk, was recently released from Lachesis Publishing, and her horror novel, The Horned Ones, is due out from Belfire in 2012.She's currently delving into steampunk, making progress on an urban paranormal series, and on a bloodthirsty Viking kick.